Re writing their stories to become our stories, our narrative, our truth.
The Recreation of the Fairytale is a creative Caribbean collective, coming together to re write Fairytales from popular culture, incorporating unknown heroes from the Caribbean. Photographers, designers, videographers, and writers all from the Caribbean have pulled together to remake:
Snow White (incorporating Vitiligo awareness, and speaking on the story of Gene Miles of Trinidad)
The Wizard of Oz (incorporating The heroes of the Haitian Revolution, incorporating Orisha elements )
Alice in Wonderland (the story of the black Caribs )
Ras-punzel - merging Caribbean folklore.
Click here to buy prints and exclusive poetry
Click here to learn more about the team involved
Introduction :
Everyday life shrinks into the mundane at every opportunity it finds. Repetitious tasks required for living can make us myopic and rob us of the insight into just how grand the human experience is on a greater scale. History is not exempt from this phenomenon, the sheer breath of the story often times begs us to homogenise it for more efficient telling. Of course there was a large and prolonged trade of enslaved Africans. Fullstop. Those people were dominated by Europe. Fullstop. Those people fought back, but it wasn’t enough. Fullstop. Those people failed to fight. Fullstop.
And on and on the story continues to shrink, until it literally becomes BLACK and WHITE.
This is why we tell stories. But even stories fall prey to the shrinking effect of time, the narratives are cut and curtailed to suit the powerful, the tales spread like viruses, seeming to give the host a beautiful anecdote or a properly recorded instance of history, when in fact we have been devastated by the influence of the stories shrunk beyond recognition.
This is why we re-tell stories.
The history that is slowly being uncovered, tells of entire worlds shrunk down to single words.
Rebellion. Rebels. Maroon. Toussaint. Ayiti. Voodoo. Caribbean.
Every word evoking a pre-determined view, told on over and over until accepted by the majority on both sides. What better way then, to show there is more than what meets the eye, than to take the hyper familiar, and insert into it that, which was previously not considered to belong.
To take images engrained in our collective psyche in a very specific manner. Familiar. Safe. Constant. To replace them with something that is the opposite – at least to the majority.
If we had to re-tell a story of a girl swept up in a tornado of circumstance, who finds herself in a strange land ruled by an all powerful force, in a city the likes she had never seen. If we had to name the Lions stripped of their courage, to describe the ones whoes intellect was stolen and became like straw to time, the ones whose hearts were stolen by circumstance.
If we are to tell that story, or speak about how it plays out again and again and again in front of us – what would it look like? In the world as it is, it would surely look like any hidden truth that finds some light.
It would look like a Revolution.
- Muhammad Muwakil
The Recreation of the Fairytale is a creative Caribbean collective, coming together to re write Fairytales from popular culture, incorporating unknown heroes from the Caribbean. Photographers, designers, videographers, and writers all from the Caribbean have pulled together to remake:
Snow White (incorporating Vitiligo awareness, and speaking on the story of Gene Miles of Trinidad)
The Wizard of Oz (incorporating The heroes of the Haitian Revolution, incorporating Orisha elements )
Alice in Wonderland (the story of the black Caribs )
Ras-punzel - merging Caribbean folklore.
Click here to buy prints and exclusive poetry
Click here to learn more about the team involved
Introduction :
Everyday life shrinks into the mundane at every opportunity it finds. Repetitious tasks required for living can make us myopic and rob us of the insight into just how grand the human experience is on a greater scale. History is not exempt from this phenomenon, the sheer breath of the story often times begs us to homogenise it for more efficient telling. Of course there was a large and prolonged trade of enslaved Africans. Fullstop. Those people were dominated by Europe. Fullstop. Those people fought back, but it wasn’t enough. Fullstop. Those people failed to fight. Fullstop.
And on and on the story continues to shrink, until it literally becomes BLACK and WHITE.
This is why we tell stories. But even stories fall prey to the shrinking effect of time, the narratives are cut and curtailed to suit the powerful, the tales spread like viruses, seeming to give the host a beautiful anecdote or a properly recorded instance of history, when in fact we have been devastated by the influence of the stories shrunk beyond recognition.
This is why we re-tell stories.
The history that is slowly being uncovered, tells of entire worlds shrunk down to single words.
Rebellion. Rebels. Maroon. Toussaint. Ayiti. Voodoo. Caribbean.
Every word evoking a pre-determined view, told on over and over until accepted by the majority on both sides. What better way then, to show there is more than what meets the eye, than to take the hyper familiar, and insert into it that, which was previously not considered to belong.
To take images engrained in our collective psyche in a very specific manner. Familiar. Safe. Constant. To replace them with something that is the opposite – at least to the majority.
If we had to re-tell a story of a girl swept up in a tornado of circumstance, who finds herself in a strange land ruled by an all powerful force, in a city the likes she had never seen. If we had to name the Lions stripped of their courage, to describe the ones whoes intellect was stolen and became like straw to time, the ones whose hearts were stolen by circumstance.
If we are to tell that story, or speak about how it plays out again and again and again in front of us – what would it look like? In the world as it is, it would surely look like any hidden truth that finds some light.
It would look like a Revolution.
- Muhammad Muwakil
View segments from the film below
